PART ONE
Explorations of Postdisciplinarity through Sloppy Craft
In her Foreword to this volume, artist Anne Wilson suggests that the coupling of âsloppyâ with âcraftâ sets up an enticing âbinary of oppositesâ that demands attention and provokes discussion and may even flip hierarchies of value. The first part in this volume includes chapters that use âsloppy craftâ in this original contextâto describe a consciously deskilled aesthetic, as elaborated on by Wilson in her Forewordâyet weave into this initial understanding parallels with queer theory, gendered labor, and processes of reskilling.
For Glenn Adamson, the postdisciplinary world that âsloppy craftâ inhabits is one in which âno one activity has any more right to be called art than anotherâ and makers are free to call themselves whatever they like, or to not call themselves anything at all.1 This questioning of identityâself-imposed or culturally constructedâis Irish scholar Joseph McBrinnâs point of entry into recent discussions of sloppy craft within a textile or fiber context.
Taking as a starting point the complex relationship between amateurism and sewing from which sloppy craft emerges, McBrinn asks us to consider âsewing amateurishly as a performative and queer act.â In his essay âMale trouble,â the interconnections between sewing, amateurism, and gender are examined by McBrinn as a means through which to investigate the textile origins of the term âsloppy craftâ and bring to light the crucial place that gay, or queer, self-identification plays within the work of artists such as Gavin Fry, Fernando Marques Penteado, and, in particular, Josh Faught, the original âsloppyâ crafter.
The dematerialization of the craft object that frequently accompanies current considerations of craft, while not new, has been used recently to position craft as a methodology, as a form of knowledge and as performance. Given this turn, it is worth noting how second wave feminist art strategies may be read as informing much contemporary âperformative craftâ showcased in exhibitions such as Gestures of Resistance and Hand+Made. As American art historians Elissa Auther and Elyse Speaks explain, several of these are also woven into the âsloppyâ work of Josh Faught in a moment of recuperation. Reflecting upon studio craft, feminist and conceptual art, and queer theory to contextualize the sloppy craft aesthetic, their âSloppy craft as temporal drag in the work of Josh Faughtâ lays the groundwork for its broader relevance within contemporary culture. Building upon scholarship at the intersection of craft and queer theory, Auther and Speaks advocate here for a âqueering of craftâ through strategies embodied in sloppy craft.
In his initial forays into postdisciplinarity, most notably in his 2008 contribution to Crafts (reprinted here as a postscript to this volume), Adamson acknowledges that craft is challenging given its continued relationship to certain modes of making, many of which, he contends, retain their value in the cultural field precisely because of their difficulty and requisite skills. Indeed, that same year, craft theorists Liesbeth Den Besten and Jorunn Veiteberg proposed deskilling as a methodology for questioning the nature of craft itself, especially when craft is understood as skilled production, which is often the case.2
This strategy is explored by Canadian curator Denis Longchamps and coupled with reskilling in the context of Canadian craft practices as these relate to a sloppy craft aesthetic. Longchampsâs chapter, âAn impression of dĂ©jĂ vu: Craft, the visual arts and the need to get sloppyâ moves us away from textile and fiber, to present the ceramic work of French-Canadian artist Laurent Craste. Crasteâs deconstructed porcelain forms are used to reinterpret the recognizable object and its attendant histories, including those of French SĂšvres porcelain and sloppy craft within the Quebec artistic milieu. In this close study of Crasteâs work within a Canadian visual and material context, Longchamps argues that skill remains important, even when artists are âgetting sloppy.â
Much as conceptual approaches in fine art practices have always depended upon an audience fluent with, or at the least familiar with, painting and sculpture, the effectiveness of these conceptual approaches to craft depends upon an audience educated in the materials, processes, skills, history, and even consumption of studio craft, or what ceramic theorist Jo Dahn rightly refers to as their cultural competence.3 Indeed, a lack of such competence within scholarship in related disciplines often hinders a more extensive and richer reading of sloppy craft. These chapters, on the other hand, open up for fruitful discussion the convergence within some sloppy craft practices of design, decorative art, craft, and art within postdisciplinarity. Are Faughtâs interiors sloppy design as well as sloppy craft? Is the work of Craste or Basque sloppy decorative arts, or part of the deskilling and reskilling of interior design and the decorative arts?
Through their contributions to this constellation of meanings for craft, which includes the discourses of skill (viewed as encompassing deskilling and reskilling), process, materials, and materiality alongside concerns for gendered labor, professionalism, global economies, sexuality, and identity, as these relate, or not, to a discrete object, the chapters in this first part explore and explode the notion of âsloppy craftâ as it was first introduced by Anne Wilson and Glenn Adamson.
Notes
1Â Â Â Â Glenn Adamson, The Craft Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2010), p. 586.
2Â Â Â Â Liesbeth Den Besten, âDeskilled Craft and Borrowed Skill,â and Jorunn Veiteberg, âStealing Skill,â papers from the 2008 Think Tank: European Initiative for the Applied Arts conference SKILL, thinktank04.eu (accessed September 15, 2012).
3Â Â Â Â Jo Dahn, âElastic/Expanding: Contemporary Conceptual Ceramics,â in Maria Elena Buszek (ed.), Extra/Ordinary (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p.169. Dahn is specifically referring to conceptual ceramics, but the principle of her remarks can be extended to craft materials in general.
1
âMale troubleâ: Sewing, amateurism, and gender
Joseph McBrinn
The American director John Watersâs 1974 Female Trouble was one of the first in a series of films to establish the campy, outlandish, and monstrous domestic characters and situations that attracted both recognition and notoriety. In Female Trouble the everyday suburban life of the lead character, Dawn Davenport (played by the transvestite Divine), is transformed into a life of crime and ultimately violence, carnage, and murder by a rather mundane incident endemic in late twentieth-century consumer-driven society. She doesnât get what she wants for Christmas. But, as Dawnâs parents tell her before she explodes into a rage and attacks them, ânice girls donât wear cha-cha heels.â Watersâs highly distinctive âvulgar, sophomoric, sloppy, [and] subversiveâ style of cinema has more recently been âadopted, improved and made profitable,â in a process of slow co-option by the mainstream movie industry.1
Watersâs amateurish aesthetic and subversive subtext had, however, already, rather surprisingly, been co-opted by feminism. In 1990, Judith Butler defined âfemale troubleâ as âthat historical configuration of a nameless female indisposition, which thinly veiled the notion that being female is a natural indisposition. Serious as the medicalization of womenâs bodies is, the term is also laughable, and laughter in the face of serious categories is indispensible for feminism.â2 Butler singled out Watersâs Female Trouble and its creation of a female protagonist (no matter how sloppily the role was played by a transvestite) as directly relevant to contemporary feminism:
Her/his performance destabilizes the very distinctions between the natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about genders almost always operates. Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established? Does being female constitute a ânatural factâ or a cultural performance, or is ânaturalnessâ constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex? Divine notwithstanding, gender practices within gay and lesbian cultures often thematize âthe naturalâ in parodic contexts that bring into relief the performative construction of an original and true sex.3
Although many women shared Amelia Jonesâs conviction that âfrom a feminist point of view, it is worth being wary of the ways in which masculine performance can be too easily recuperated into rather predictable and self-serving clichĂ©s of male artistic prowess,â Butlerâs deconstruction of genderâs taxonomic instability reflected a wider shift in thinking about gender.4
Indeed by 1988, âfemale troubleâ aside, Constance Penley and Sharon Willis had already posited that âthe idea of masculinity itself is both theoretically and historically troubled.â5 They further suggested that through approaching the study of masculinity âfrom an explicitly feminist theoretical and historical perspectiveâ it would be possible to deconstruct the oversimplified assumption of âgender polarization, where all women are victims and all men are unimpeded agents of patriarchy.â6 We can update Butlerâs use of Divine and Watersâs Female Trouble as a historical moment that exposed the mutability of gender performance by exploring the work and celebrity of British artist Grayson Perry. Although better known as a ceramist, he has also worked in textiles, such as embroidery and quilting and even dressmaking, placing these on a par with his pots, limited edition prints, and performances.
In October 2000, Perry held a âcoming out ceremonyâ for himself at the Laurent Delaye Gallery in London, where he made a short speech to friends and family about âcoming outâ as a transvestite. For the occasion he made and wore a special âComing Out Dressâ made from silk satin, rayon, and lace and hand-embroidered. It is, Perry said, a âclassic little girl dressâ using âpretty sugary coloursâ to embody âfrilliness and sissinessâthe absolute antithesis of macho.â7 In 2003, when Perry won the prestigious Turner Prize, he attended the ceremony dressed as his transvestite alter-ego Claire in the very same dress. In a subsequent interview in the Guardian newspaper, Perry stated that one of the joys of having a dress hand-sewn âis that it is almost a political statement. Itâs a way of rebelling against capitalism which makes money out of gender identity by supplying you with the consumer goods you need to support that identity.â8
There is a multitude of other examples of male artists appropriating not just the gender-bending rhetoric of drag but more particularly the rather abject amateurism of needlecrafts to explore this slippage between gender construction and lived reality. Being a man and working with historically feminized craft techniques may be a double bind of acceptance and rejection, but it is undeniable that it has brought some men such as Grayson Perry enhanced visibility at some of the most prestigious international platforms in the art world. For example, consider the case of Italian artist Francesco Vezzoliâs film installation and small portraits of female celebrities made of metallic thread stitched onto photographically printed canvas, sometimes shaped into embroidery hoops, shown at the 2001 Venice Biennale;9 or the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibareâs installation Gallantry and Criminal Conversation for Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, which consisted of a series of headless life-size mannequins dressed in exquisitely stitched clothes, made in an affective homespun manner like Perryâs baby-doll dress but using faux-authentic African batik fabric, and arranged in a scene of sexual debauchery to highlight the exploitative colonial tourism of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. And like those of Perry and Vezzoli, the fabrication of this installation, although arguably reliant on professional outsourced labor, plays in its most basic (fabric) form on the rhetoric of amateurism.
The description of Divine and Watersâs cinematic collaborations as âvulgar,â âsloppy,â and âsubversiveâ uses terms that often circulate around menâs engagement with various needlecraft activities, revealing anxiety, even today, in relation to the materialization of gender construction. Although the term âsloppyâ was notably use...